1. RACE FOR SPEED. If you run enough shorter races (a 10K, 15K) while building toward a marathon, is it still necessary to do speed work at the track?

Lars Cline, St. Paul, MN

NO. AS a matter of fact, for my last marathon, which was a 2:13:55, I didn’t step on the track at all. I only did one or two Fartlek workouts per week. My favorite for years has been 6 × 3 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy. That way I get about 1K in with each repeat, and it’s 18 minutes of hard running—just enough to develop enough speed for a marathon. I follow this up with a few five-mile races, which I mostly trained through.

This isn’t to say speed work isn’t important. Work on your speed as best you can, but remember you don’t have to be fast for 26 miles. It’s more important to develop that marathon-type strength necessary to cover that last six miles. All the speed in the world won’t help you if you’re crashing at mile 23.

Joe LeMay
is one of the United States’ premier marathoners and has an outrageous Web site at www.joelemay.com

DO WHAT you’re used to. If you have not done a lot of track in the past, do not get into the habit now. Remember that it’s the ability to run faster than training pace that makes it a race, anyway. Consider running Fartlek in training, running a minute on and off, running telephone poles, varying the speeds as your comfort level allows. Do not get in with a group who leave their peak performances on the track and limp away with an injury. Too many marathoners get injured on the track within a month of their marathon.

Marathons do not happen on a track, so why train on one? With the recovery runs, long runs, and regular one-hour runs with the most important ingredient of hill repeats, you’ll be ready to run your marathon.

Rob Reid
is an outstanding masters marathoner and the race director of the Royal Victoria Marathon in British Columbia.

AT FIRST glance, speed work at the track sounds like a fine plan, but it makes less sense the more you think about it. Longer races, especially if you run them at your lactate threshold, have more to do with building marathon-specific fitness than, say, weekly half-mile repeats. But here come the negatives. First, a 10K or 15K race contains significantly more miles of hard running than you probably do in a weekly track workout. Now, this might not be a problem if you were to run them solely as workouts, but come on, we’ve all said, “I’m running this as a workout” and been unable to contain ourselves.

Also, even if you were able to run them entirely at a controlled pace, there’s the issue of muddying the distinction between workouts and races. Some people have no problem with this, but I know a lot of people who enter races as “workouts” and, once it’s time to enter races as races, don’t really run any faster.

Most important, though, is the timing inherent in your proposed plan. These races are going to be on weekends, when you’ll probably also be doing your long runs. So that means either doing what would be a very hard workout during a race on Saturday, then going long the next day or, worse, going long on Saturday to account for the fact that most races are on Sundays. Either way, your long run, which is the most important aspect of your marathon preparation, is compromised significantly.

Scott Douglas
is the former editor of Running Times and the “On The Road” columnist for Marathon & Beyond.